www.feedthebot.com How to follow the Google webmaster guidelines

 

 

Question ...

 

Answer ...

 

When you search on Google for people linking to you by using the link search - "link:www.example.com" it does not display a full list of the links to your site, it only displays a "sampling".

Google has stated this in their help pages specifically.

 

- (notice it starts with "To find a sampling of pages that link to a URL.. " - Google help page

 

Google knows what is linking to your site, it just chooses not to display a comprehensive list of the links they know about due to practices like "link chasing" and other reverse engineering attempts to manipulate search results.

When you check things like "link popularity" you will notice that Yahoo and MSN will give you more exact data. If the Yahoo and MSN bots can see those links then you can be reasonably sure Googlebot does too.

Google is aware of the links to your site.

This issue has caused much controversy among webmasters because it seems pretty strange for Google to have a feature that is disabled intentionally.

Some think that Google is silly for this, some say Google has every right to run their website however they want.

Regardless of the opinions, the reality is that Google is not currently showing link data as explicitly as they used to.

 

An interesting article from Matt Cutt's (Google employee in charge of spam) blog about links and their value:

Text links and page rank